Most of us are too convenient to be exceptional. I am as guilty as everyone is.

Why a beginner’s mind?

Practice makes perfect. Once we have found out what works, we tend to be stuck repeating the same procedure. We replicate, reiterate and duplicate our success but we are not creative anymore.

The most successful people in history are those who tried new things, who were pioneers in a field, who created new and fascinating approaches.

We can do the same in photography.

When we venture out into our scene with a beginners mind, we are willing to try something new, something we usually would never try, something the expert in us utterly rejects. We learned how expose a shot, how to pull details out of RAW images and how to create HDR images beyond the visible range of our eyes.

However, we forgot the art part of our photography.

Blown out highlights in fashion photography, underexposed dark alleys, blurry drive by shootings, grossly distorted wide angle landscapes are often enhancing the picture, but we are too afraid to try it.

Online expert communities tend to dismiss those things as imperfections and discourage us from trying something outside the perceived realm of good and acceptable pictures. The hive mind of these communities distorts our vision towards the mean, the average, and the acceptable. We are in danger to become another dot in the infinite noise of the internet.

Who says I cannot hold a camera out of the window of a speeding car and snap beautifully colored and blurred fall foliage?

Composition

The most powerful instrument of photography is composition. We must not blindly follow rules of composition. It does not hurt to know these rules, but it does not encourage the beginner’s mind to stick to rules.

Forget the rules for a moment and try out new compositions.

Lay on your back and photograph the trees with a fisheye lens! For every shot you take, step around, find new positions and new angles and shoot again. Get low for a different perspective, climb a tree and shoot down. Just try things you normally would not try and see how these work. Only if we continuously force ourselves to revisit our habits and break them, can we evolve our photography.

Conclusion

Do not let the expert in you hold you back! See the world through the eyes of a child again. A child that is willing to explore all options and try all things! Throw out your preconceptions and start every shoot with a fresh mind set!

This article is part of a series on becoming better a photographer. If you enjoy following along, subscribe to the feed.